Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums Modifications Suspension Cut springs!!!

Rodger that, my Stang dropped 1.75" after I put on FMC "C" springs with 1/2 a coil cut off. had to put in some urethane isolators in to get back a .25". Heres a before and after of her.
http://www.mustangmods.com/data/666/Together.jpg

What are these so called urethane isolators? Do they lift back up? I need them for my rears. I decided instead of switching out my front springs, or cutting them, or clamping them, I'll just try to lift up the rear a bit if possible. The front is about 3/4-1 inch higher than the rear. Is this what they are for? If so, are they reliable and where do you get them? So many questions.

The urethene isolators are more dense than the stock pieces and of course will also last a bit longer. The isolators go between the springs and the suspension/body to dampen noise. If you have that much of a difference the isolators won't help much, better you should think look into spring spacers or maybe a set of sport springs to correct the problem and drop her down a little.

Cutting springs a slight amount is the correct way to fine tune the ride height of even performance springs. Now it is obviously up to the technician doing the final install to determine if the final ride height will effect the performance of all the rest of the geometry in the suspension. I've owned 3 Mustangs in the past that all had 1 coil cold-cut off the front and 1 1/4 coils off the rear and one of those cars I had, had even gotten around 85,000 miles of my hard driving on it with them cut like that with absolutely NO problems ever. It dropped about 1 inch all the way around. And the car with that setup did ride just a tad stiffer, but that is because there is one less coil to absorb shock in the suspension as before. It worked good, because it stiffened the suspension a slight amount to really increase the handling of the car a lot. Now you don't want to lower your car too much or you gotta make other changes as well to compensate. Like after so low you need offset rack bushings to raise your rack & pinion unit up so your tie rods are level again (to elliminate bumpsteer) to name one thing. But the idea is not to take out so much spring that they fall out when you jack the car up and the suspension fully extends, no. It is just to lower the ride height by a slight amount to effectively lower your center of gravity a little bit and adding a slight amount of stiffness to help reduce sway. I'm going to cut a slight bit off my Contour's front springs pretty quick so I can just bring the level even with the rear (to counteract the weight of my speaker box in the rear). And I know I will have no adverse reactions from this since I will only be going about 1 inch down and then I will do an alignment again to make sure that the lowering didn't throw off the caster/camber/toe to unacceptable levels. 1 inch is not enough to cause havoc in the geometry. The key is not to go too far with cutting. Or any method of lowering for that matter. Lowering springs can ALSO throw your suspension way off correct geometry, making it necessary to do many other mods to bring everthing back into safe tolerances again. Technician must be educated enough to know of any adverse reactions that may result from any mods he makes to the suspension. I have my ASE certification in suspension and with all my knowledge, I have no problem with cutting springs as long as you know what your doing and how far you are going.

Well said, Josch. Here's some further info for anyone interested in cutting Contour springs: I cut mine while they were still mounted on the car. Here's how: I jacked up the car and took off the wheels. Then I attempted to put on the spring compressors, but the bolts on the spring compressor I rented from Kragen Auto Parts were too long (about 12"), and there wasn't enough room for them inside the strut tower. So I slipped a six-inch long piece of half-inch steel pipe over the spring compressor bolts. The pipe acted as a spacer and kept the bolts from hitting against the top of the spring or the strut tower. Then I just tightened down the spring compressors. Now comes the hard part: you have to cut the coils VERY CAREFULLY because there is not much room to work inside the wheel well, and you have to be careful not to cut into the other coils, or the strut base. I made protective pads out of fiberboard and duct-taped them on the places I wanted to protect. Then I cut the bottom coil off with my angle grinder. Then I removed the cut-off coil from the strut. It takes a little work to remove the cut-off coil, because it gets a little pinched down against the strut base by the remaining spring. I cut the cut-off coil in half to get it off, and then used a floor jack and some pieces of steel pipe to raise the spring enough to extract the cut-off coil. The whole job might have gone much faster if the spring compressors were slimmer so they would fit better in the limited space available, and compressed the spring more. Anyway, the Kragen compressors worked, but just barely. I did the job in three hours, and I didn't have to mess with disassembling the struts, knuckles, tie rod ends, brake lines, etc. Do I recommend it? Well, not really, unless you have better spring compressors than I did. With the spring compressors I used, there really was very little room for error with the angle grinder. And I had to get pretty creative with the floor jack to extract the cut-off coil from the strut.

Why would the springs settle any more just by cutting? Unless they were new springs, they settled before they were even cut.

1314: Yup mine were new springs and I really wrung'm hard on that lumpy road.

1314, to answer your question about why springs would "settle" after cutting: it may be because a newly-cut coil does not rest completely flat on the strut base (or the strut hat, if you cut the top coil on the spring). When I first cut my springs, they rested flat against the strut base for only about half of the bottom coil. After a few days, almost two-thirds of the bottom coil is resting in full contact with the strut base, and the car has settled about a quarter inch. I guess it takes a few days (or weeks) for the weight of the car to push the cut coil flat down against the strut base. Anybody out there know more about this?

Wow, this is all very interesting. It seems like I may be up for some coil cutting. Does anyone have any pictures of their contours with their springs cut?

I'm running 18s and haven't dropped the car at all, so I've been looking around. I don't want to slam the car, but I want to have a reasonable drop to compensate for the gap. I've always thought that an inch would probably do the trick. It would at least get me back closer to the stock height, I went with 225/40/18s, so I'm slightly higher than stock.

So, what was the overall drop consensus? 3/4", 1", 1 1/4" ?

Thanks

(I really need to roll those fenders too!)

I have pictures of my 98 SE V6 with 1 coil cut. It looks great, not too low, not too high. I got 1" drop in the front, and 1/2" in the back. The link to my pictures is in my sig, check it out!

Originally posted by JeremySeVT:

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Wow, this is all very interesting. It seems like I may be up for some coil cutting. Does anyone have any pictures of their contours with their springs cut?

I'm running 18s and haven't dropped the car at all, so I've been looking around. I don't want to slam the car, but I want to have a reasonable drop to compensate for the gap. I've always thought that an inch would probably do the trick. It would at least get me back closer to the stock height, I went with 225/40/18s, so I'm slightly higher than stock.

So, what was the overall drop consensus? 3/4", 1", 1 1/4" ?

Thanks

(I really need to roll those fenders too!)

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